Professor (Geophysics), Rice University

Jonathan Ajo-Franklin

Dr. Jonathan Ajo-Franklin is a professor of geophysics at RiceUniversity in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (EEPS) as well as a visiting faculty scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Jonathan is an applied geophysicist working on problems in the environmental and energy domains including geothermal energy production, geological carbon storage, and near-surface hydrogeophysics. His group specializes in new acquisition and processing strategies for timelapse seismology including distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), permanent seismic source development, and high-resolution ambient noise approaches. He is also interested in the microscale physics and chemistry of geomaterials relevant to interpreting geophysical datasets, particularly the properties of fractures and mechanical alterations during reactive flow. He led the Imperial Valley Dark Fiber Project (DOE GTO) which explored approaches for geothermal exploration using DAS deployed on telecom fiber and was the PI of FOGMORE@Utah FORGE, an R&D project exploring integrated fiber-optic sensing for geothermal reservoir monitoring.

Jonathan received his BA in Computer Science and History at Rice University
(1998), followed by an MS (2003) and PhD (2005) in Geophysics at Stanford University. After his postdoctoral studies at MIT’s Earth Resources Laboratory (2005-2007), he spent 12 years on the staff at LBNL before joining the faculty at Rice EEPS in 2019